Fret

I fret by nature—I can just immediately see things through to their final, horrible completions, and then I impotently await the awful outcomes. I can see accidents waiting the happen, injuries just waiting to occur. Miraculously, I’m not a hovering sort of mother—I don’t impede my kids’ childhood fun by telling them all the way they could impale themselves or fall to their deaths. I just see them all and ponder them in my heart. My anxious, anxious heart.

When at Christmas my mom set a hot cookie sheet too close to the table edge, I saw my son leaning his forearm on the scalding metal before I could even get out the verbal warning—he still has a pale pink mark from the burn.

When the Arctic cold prediction came across the news last week, a frozen pool flashed in my brain, and I spent the next three days watching the pumps freeze, the waterfalls ice over, the mechanisms slowly break, tallying the steep repair costs despite the pool company’s stoic assurances that none of those things would happen. But, I knew. I saw it all three days ago.

On the other end of the spectrum, my husband is wildly optimistic. Even with stacked odds, he maintains hope that somehow things might right themselves. I love him for this. But it also makes me feel alone in my anxiety, huddled in my corner with these dark omens and harbingers.

I’m working on seeing the beautiful, positive potential in things, and also in people. It’s hard. And as I sit here with two cracked garage springs, a wrecked pool, and a busted hot water pipe from this storm, I am struggling with optimism. It’s hard to foretell all the carnage and then watch it play out in slow motion, again, and again, and again. Day 57.